Some time ago, I was tasked with remastering the Players Handbook for the Castles & Crusades ruleset because it was older DLC, the kind where the whole book is split up into hundreds of small pages in the Library? It was also ugly, a bit messy to navigate, yadda yadda. I'm sure it was fine for its day but it's almost 2018 and users are more savvy now. I love my Men in Black references, so here we go:

Old & Busted:


See? Not pretty. Plenty of bogus data and links (see the image titles didn't even work), quite a bit of completely unnecessary markup, and the Spells... oy... I'd guess roughly 70% of the spell descriptions were missing words, sometimes sentences, often entire paragraphs. I was shocked no one had complained.

However, this being essentially volunteer work (commissions only go to the ruleset developer) I took my time with it and didn't even really get serious about tackling the remaster til a month or so ago. I hit a snag on the project I was working on, so my attention came back over to C&C and I went full steam on getting the remaster done! This is the 7th Printing which just released a few months ago, and includes both the original and the alternate cover artwork.

The Players Handbook itself is obviously in gorgeous reference manual format now, with embedded images, sidebars, reference tables, the works. I did submit a minor code enhancement to the ruleset itself which resized the class and race windows to the size all the other rulesets use, then for the C&C class and race descriptions I took the source text and rearranged it in a manner consistent with the layout we also see in the 5E and Pathfinder descriptions. The goal there was that if we want C&C to get more attention, there needs to be some consistency when they show up from what they've already been using. It's still the original text from Troll Lords, just tweaked in appearance for those windows, while the reference manual section is straight from the book.

Obviously, the spells were looked at pretty hard, due to the sad shape they were in. Practically ever single one of them had to be re-created from scratch to get all the correct info.

In addition, I created a "Quick Reference Index" so that both players and GMs would have a single, easy-to-find spot to bring up individual reference tables, or text pages such as the list and descriptions of all the standard actions, combat maneuvers, and so forth. No more flipping through the reference manual when you need to make a quick arbitration or look something up. As an added bonus, I included the wiki page for Effects in there so no more needing to tab out to a browser for the effect syntax, it's all right there in your FG window now.

New Hotness:


The remaster spent roughly a week on the Test channel, then went Live last week as a FREE update to everyone who owns the C&C ruleset. :D

So enjoy the updates, and spread the word, Crusaders!

The initial Release Candidate (still a Work in Progress!) of Monsters & Treasure 4th Printing just went onto the Test channel for feedback as well, and will receive regular patches until it's ready to get pushed to Live.

So actually I thought I was "simply" doing a remaster of the old pre-SmiteWorks conversion of Monsters & Treasure of Aihrde for the Castles & Crusades® ruleset which is already available in the FG Store.

Got the reference manual finished right away. Turns out the whole section on the powers of dragons is missing, so that's in my new one. There's a lot of messy markup in there, the worst being that the weird (for FG's new standardization anyway) database organization prevents all the monsters from loading into FG's NPC master index window on the sidebar. So that's been fixed, as you can see in the screenshot.



Then I remembered Troll Lords recently completed a Kickstarter for a new printing of MTA which will include some tweaks and 20+ new monsters! So, I'll go ahead and proceed with the pure remaster portion of things and when I get my hands on the public release of the new MTA book, I'll add in the new bits, change whatever was tweaked and send 'er in!

I do want to treat C&C with some professionalism and respect, as it is a licensed ruleset just like 5E is and now Pathfinder is. So, mimicking the 5E Monster Manual, I did put all the intro text, etc. into a reference manual which I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago. I am also putting all the monsters into collapsible index lists so GMs can quickly find the monsters they're looking for sorted alphabetically, by HD, and by type. I've started that part but have a ways to go still. The sidebar NPC master index will always be available which is alpha-sorted as well.

I'm also hoping to provide a desktop decal of the cover art scene, like the 5E and Pathfinder source books do...

Somehow, as if I didn't have enough on my plate already, I managed to put Frog God Games' The Lost Lands on my Fantasy Grounds queue. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how a basically black and white reference manual would look since that's how FGG's material is printed. I also wanted to use their header font in the refmanual.

Here's the first attempt:



I originally had the header font set to 36px which looked awesome on the refmanual page, but as you can see over on the Library window, the same font gets used for the Library Category (the line that says "Adventure") and at 36px it clipped outside its allowed dimensions. That really bothers me when something is defined very specifically then is utilized non-specifically. Oh well, back to the default size we go. Sigh.

My main concern with having a "Frog God theme" is that white is often hard on the eyes. I've heard that complaint from 5E's official Wizards of the Coast theme, and I've made that complaint myself. Even reading FGG's PDFs I'm usually like "damn, that's white" and squinting while reading. The texture I chose for this experiment is from CoreRPG and is actually slightly off-white as you will see in the next screenshot, as the map on the page has a white background and it stands out. The texture from CoreRPG is still a bit on the bright side, though.



Once I got all the text from the Forward in there, added the map image, added a second image of the horizontal rule that FGG uses, then put the quote section in CoreRPG's default "book" frame. I also put the FGG font in the chapter and section lines of the refmanual but it's a little on the iffy side the way it calculates the sizes so I don't know if I would keep that in the final product. If there is a final FGG theme product at all.

I probably won't actually be working on getting the FGG Lost Lands converted for Pathfinder (and 5E if I have the energy) until I've completed my Castles & Crusades queue though, but I was bored in the hotel tonight so whipped up this theme to get an idea if it was something I'd be interested in working on, plus I wanted to see if I could get the FGG font in there. I guess mission accomplished--kinda?

Since pretty much every project I do involves the CoreRPG Reference Manual feature, and I like things as pretty as possible, I thought I'd take a shot at theming the refmanual -- and only the refmanual. That's actually tricky because almost every window template in FG uses the "groupbox" frame so if I changed that one texture, BAM, every single window now uses that texture. Which in the case of what I was doing with Castles & Crusades, looked wonky as hell.

So I ended up having to create two new frames. Which was cool in the sense of "hey, I made something!" I had considered submitting it to Moon Wizard for inclusion in the base CoreRPG code but after seeing how the window templates are made, I can't think of a way to have this and not break all the refmanuals that already exist and I don't think the guys at SmiteWorks want to run through the source code doing a find/replace on umpteen products. So... I guess we'll just leave it as a theme extension thing.

Anyway, my goal was: since Castles & Crusades is officially licensed and I've had a few communications with some of the folks at Troll Lord Games and they're wanting to build their audience on Fantasy Grounds, to see if I could get the refmanual to look as closely as possible to the official PDFs without changing all the rest of the FG windows.

Here's the Player's Handbook PDF next to my new refmanual theme for C&C then that same page popped out into its own window to see the default style (which you can also see in my previous blog entry for U1):



Oh, and yeah I'm also doing a revamp of CS1 After Winter's Dark as you can see here. It's been finished for awhile just waiting for me to go back and add in the search keywords. ::grumble:: Hope to get it out soon so C&C players can enjoy the content!

My next project will be a revamp of the Castles & Crusades adventure U1 - Shadows of the Halfling Hall. Not totally sure, but this might be the first officially sanctioned revamp of an existing module from the Fantasy Grounds Store? Anyway, the U1 in the Store has the basics but is missing at least one of the monsters which has stat blocks in the PDF. No NPCs have tokens. No combat encounters are built. And so on.

So the deal is: I revamp U1 to modern Fantasy Grounds aesthetics, make the adventure work the way it's supposed to, then I convert U2 through U4 which will be new additions to the Store and complete the U-series of adventures.

Only a day into it, but here's some of what I've got done so far:



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Interface Zero is awesome. Period. There is no argument to the contrary. Hardcore, mature cyberpunk (or would it be post-cyberpunk since it's in the future not an alternate 80s?) with action movie flare for the win!

John Wick is awesome. Period. There is no argument to the contrary.

So when John Wick writes an adventure for Interface Zero? Yeah, you bet I'm going to jump right on that. I mean, c'mon, this is John. Effing. Wick!



As you can see, I used the Reference Manual presentation I had learned while doing Lankhmar: City of Thieves and put it to full use here. I split it up into two different methods:

1. The Reference Manual contains all the text from the actual scenario PDF including all the background information on the characters and the story so the GM can use that to prep. That means all the Story content is there, too, so a GM can run Jericho Rose totally from the Reference Manual if she wishes.
2. The Story content is also contained in Fantasy Ground's normal campaign Story window like every other Fantasy Grounds product so that there is no confusion. Only the Story content is in the Story window however, so it's not bloated with extra unnecessary stuff.

If you're not familiar with Jericho Rose, it's a cyberpunk noir adventure. To put it mildly, it's dark, it's gritty, and there's a very high probability that it won't end well. Excellent stuff! No rainbows and kittens happy ending here, no sir!

It's also sorta-kinda sandboxy. Mr. Wick set up twelve scenes and at the end of each scene presented directions on which scene should be next based on the players' discoveries or actions. In the Story windows, each scene has links for the GM to click to bring up the next scene.

There's also quite a bit of dialogue, all of which are put into chat frames so the GM can simply click the button if he wishes to utilize that feature of Fantasy Grounds, or read it out loud. I believe GMs should have choices and GM with their own style so I tried to write this conversion to allow for varying GM styles.

I hope you all enjoy the first official IZ2.0 adventure scenario for Fantasy Grounds! Thanks for reading and your support, and happy gaming! :)

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I was recently asked "hey, why don't you do a Project Update-style blog post so the community knows what you're working on?"

My reply was something along the lines of "I dunno, is that a thing? Am I supposed to do that? No one told me to do that!" But I glanced around the Blogs section here and sure enough, some of my fellow freelancers do exactly that. So here. We. Go. ;)

I guess I'm one of the newer freelance conversion "developers" for Fantasy Grounds! I got the green light and thumbs up from the fine folk at SmiteWorks in the latter part of July to begin development of an official Fantasy Grounds version of Pinnacle's Lankhmar: City of Thieves setting. I own several of the existing settings for Savage Worlds here on Fantasy Grounds so I based my work on those initially. Within two weeks I was finished with version 1.0 of the Lankhmar setting. But over those two weeks my XML coding became more efficient with better coding practices. So I did a full revamp using the new knowledge and skills I'd picked up. For the most part, it still looked the same, just under the hood was coded way better so I felt better about letting anyone else use it.



As you can see, it looked identical to every other Savage Worlds setting. Everything contained within the Library Index itself because where else would it go? The current version of the Savage Worlds ruleset has some fugly windows too. A single dark-ish texture with black text. My eyes water every time I have to read anything for more than a few minutes. So I desperately wanted a better presentation, and was a little envious at the lovely Reference Manuals in all the 5E products I own on Fantasy Grounds. But I couldn't learn how to do that because all official 5E content is encrypted. So I commenced another week or two of probably being a total pain in the posterior until finally someone showed me how it worked so I would shut up and leave everyone alone about it.

Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration... :)

The good news is that I took all that brand-new Reference Manual knowledge and started back from scratch for a third revamp to deliver what I hope is the best-looking Savage Worlds product on Fantasy Grounds! It's much easier to read the text and navigating a single Reference Manual is easier than having multiple windows open on the screen, which has a direct effect on better RAM usage.



The final (well, so far) version has been submitted and is in the queue for the official Review process!

The other Savage Worlds developers took notice and you will soon see other products getting a Reference Manual revamp as well as many products going forward using it as the primary means of presentation for rule and setting content.

Thank you so much for reading and for your support! :) Happy Gaming!

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